Sunday Pages: "Bleak House"
A novel by Charles Dickens
Dear Reader,
If Charles Dickens were alive today, and at the peak of his considerable powers, he would not invest his energies writing interminable novels for an increasingly book-averse population. Instead of waiting for fresh serialized chapters of David Copperfield, we’d be eagerly anticipating the next episode of a series of that title to drop on HBO. Twenty twenty-four Dickens would be Shonda Rhimes—creative dynamo, showrunner of some of the most popular, most watched, and most lucrative programs on television, with a thousand projects big and small going at all once.
Commercially- and critically-successful creative dynamo is what Dickens was in his own period, which is to say the era between the publication of the first installment of The Pickwick Papers in April 1836—a year before Queen Victoria took the throne—to the scrawling of the last lines of the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, as he lay dying, at age 58, in June 1870. Unlike many writers, who are given to shyness, he was an enormous personality in real life. He was a gifted mimic, a talented comic performer with great stage presence, and he may well have gone into his beloved theater if the chips had fallen differently. He wrote voluminous correspondence and took in plays and did some acting and directing and wrote letters to newspapers and contributed some journalism and went on speaking tours and traveled around Europe and the United States, and he walked a dozen miles a day around London, and he fathered ten children, and he spent the last dozen years of his life living “in sin” with a woman who nowadays would be his second wife but back then was a secret partner because the discovery of their forbidden relationship would have been scandalous, and while he was doing all of THAT, this literary Energizer Bunny was banging out novel after novel after novel, bestseller after bestseller after bestseller, each one longer than the next. Bleak House, which some consider his best literary work, checks in at over 358,000 words!
I have long resisted Dickens. He got paid by the word, and was thus financially incentivized to add extra padding to the books; this always struck me as too commercial an approach to produce great literary fiction. And the character names, while delightful—Ebenezer Scrooge, of course; but also Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Uriah Heep, Sophy Wackles, Lucretia Tox, Charity Pecksniff, and [checks notes] Dick Swiveller—are too silly to be taken seriously. Any of the appellations just listed could plausibly be the stage name of some lesser porn star.
(It is a fun game to pick which figures in the MAGA universe have Dickens names. Elon Musk, most definitely. Hope Hicks, for sure. Seb Gorka, Mehmet Oz, Mike and Sarah Huckabee. Marsha Blackburn could have been a minor character who spontaneously combusts, as Krook does in Bleak House. And with his Dickensian name, his caricature of a personality, his naked parsimony, and his active malevolence, especially towards children, Donald Trump might just as well be a character in the novel. We can easily imagine him surveying the Bleak House grounds1 and remarking on what a fine golf course he could make of it.)
In high school, I read Great Expectations. I’ve tried several times since to re-read it, but I can’t get past the child abuse depicted in the first chapters. As good as the introduction to A Tale of Two Cities is—although often misconstrued2—I lose the plot by chapter three. And I’ve seen a thousand variations of A Christmas Carol but never delved in to the original text. That’s the full extent of my Dickens reading.
But then, a few weeks ago, the thick Penguin Classics paperback of Bleak House, which has been in my possession for God knows how long, called out to me, for three days in a row, from its place on the dusty shelves. With my brain feeling like an old car that just hit 200,000 miles, I knew it would do me some good to read, and not just read but finish, a long novel. Long-novel-reading is like Pilates for the mind—it exercises muscles not much used in quotidian life, and that are otherwise in danger of atrophying. It was time, I decided, to get my Dickens on. And so, over the course of a few weeks, I made my slow, steady way through all 989 pages.
In his lecture on Bleak House, first given while teaching at Wellesley College in 1941,3 Vladimir Nabokov said that to tackle the novel, “We just surrender ourselves to Dickens’s voice—that is all. . . All we have to do when reading Bleak House is relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science…The brain only continues the spine: the wick goes through the whole candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week.” (If updated for today, he might have instead said, “our TikToks, our Instagram reels, our Netflix specials, our Spotify wraps.”)
“But,” he continues, “I think Dickens will prove stronger.” One of my favorite writers, Nabokov has provided my spine with no short supply of shivers. So if he says we should surrender to Dickens’s voice, and that said voice is powerful enough to drown out the noise around us, well, that’s good enough for me.
Lo, Nabokov was right. Dickens is—here’s a hot take—a magnificent writer in terms of the construction of sentences, the vast vocabulary at his disposal, the wry deployment of jokes, the poetry of individual paragraphs, and the weaving together of seemingly endless strands of plot-lines, transforming, with almost architectural precision, what seems like a mountainous pile of clumped-together yarn (like the one in our bedroom that my wife, as I type this, is endeavoring to untangle) into a perfectly knit work of art. As Nabokov puts it, “The magic trick Dickens is out to perform implies balancing these three globes [i.e., the three themes of the book], juggling with them, keeping them in a state of coherent unity, maintaining these three balloons in the air without getting their strings snarled.”
And, yes: Dickens brings the spine-shivers. Making my way through the book, I stopped countless times to admire a passage. Here is one paragraph, well into a very long book, right after the disappearance of the wonderfully named Lady Dedlock—lovely in its construction, gorgeous in its word choices, and poetical in its observations:
As all partings foreshadow the great final one, so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be. My Lady’s state has a hollow look, thus gloomy and abandoned; and in the inner apartment, where [the detective] Mr. Bucket last night made his secret perquisition, the traces of her dresses and her ornaments, even the mirrors accustomed to reflect them when they were a portion of herself, have a desolate and vacant air. Dark and cold as the wintry day is, it is darker and colder in these deserted chambers than in many a hut that will barely exclude the weather; and though the servants heap fires in the grates and set the couches and the chairs within the warm glass screens that let their ruddy light shoot through to the furthest corners, there is a heavy cloud upon the rooms which no light will dispel.
And here we have a perfect example of a typical Dickensian paragraph, piled high, like a fancy sandwich at some renowned Philadelphia deli, with all the key ingredients of his best work: long, billowy sentences; repetition of words and phrases; lists; granular familiarity with London, and with its inhabitants high and low (with more sympathy, always, for the latter); and, to prove the point, a not-so-subtle jab at the rich and powerful, served up in a flowery piece of writing which elegance belies its implicit disgust. Mr. Bucket, mentioned here, is a police inspector:
Wintry morning, looking with dull eyes and sallow face upon the neighborhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling to get out of bed. Many of them are not early risers at the brightest of times, being birds of night who roost when the sun is high and are wide awake and keen for prey when the stars shine out. Behind dingy blind and curtain, in upper story and garret, skulking more or less under false names, false hair, false titles, false jewelry, and false histories, a colony of brigands lie in their first sleep. Gentlemen of the green-baize road who could discourse from personal experience of foreign galleys and home treadmills; spies of strong governments that eternally quake with weakness and miserable fear, broken traitors, cowards, bullies, gamesters, shufflers, swindlers, and false witnesses; some not unmarked by the branding-iron beneath their dirty braid; all with more cruelty in them than was in Nero, and more crime than is in Newgate. For howsoever bad the devil can be in fustian or smock-frock (and he can be very bad in both), he is a more designing, callous, and intolerable devil when he sticks a pin in his shirt-front, calls himself a gentleman, backs a card or color, plays a game or so of billiards, and knows a little about bills and promissory notes, than in any other form he wears. And in such form Mr. Bucket shall find him, when he will, still pervading the tributary channels of Leicester Square.
And here is another shorter but no less exquisite passage deep in the novel, concerning Sir Leicester Dedlock’s powerful and mysterious attorney, one Mr. Tulkinghorn:
The time was once when men as knowing as Mr. Tulkinghorn would walk on turret-tops in the starlight and look up into the sky to read their fortunes there. Hosts of stars are visible to-night, though their brilliancy is eclipsed by the splendor of the moon. If he be seeking his own star as he methodically turns and turns upon the leads, it should be but a pale one to be so rustily represented below. If he be tracing out his destiny, that may be written in other characters nearer to his hand.
Mr. Tulkinghorn does not make many appearances in the novel’s 67 chapters, but when he does materialize, with his grim gravitas, unknowable poker face, and ill intent, we know, as readers, to stand up straight and pay attention, as if he were an actual attorney, funded by rich and villainous Republicans, come to take our deposition, on which our family’s future depends.
There’s a lot going on in Bleak House, but ultimately, the book is a scathing commentary on lawyers—a profession which, as a whole, Mr. Dickens is not particularly fond of. Rather, he seems to hold with Mr. George, the military veteran and gun-shop owner, accused, falsely, of a homicide:
“You won’t have a lawyer?”
“No, sir.” Mr. George shook his head in the most emphatic manner. “I thank you all the same, sir, but—no lawyer!”
“Why not?”
“I don’t take kindly to the breed,” said Mr. George.
And since the homicide in question is Mr. Tulkinghorn’s, the “whodunit” narrative that dominates the last third of the novel quite literally involves an eminently capable investigator, said Mr. Bucket, trying to determine which, among the many, many primary, secondary and tertiary characters that might have wanted the terrifying lawyer dead, actually did the deed.
Dickens doesn’t hide his disdain for the Chancery Court—that is, the court that deals with wills, probates, estates, and other civil matters.4 He lets us know his feelings right up front, in the fifth and sixth paragraphs of the first chapter:
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their color and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”
The book’s “MacGuffin” is an eternal probate case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has been wending its way through the Chancery Court, seemingly from time immemorial. The main characters are all connected to the case or the Court. Some are extended members of the Jarndyce family, on one side or the other of the internecine legal battle. Some, like the aforementioned Mr. Tulkinghorn, are lawyers. Others earn their daily bread by doing business with and for the Court and its lawyers, while still more have some tangential connection to the Court, the case, or the other characters. The molassesine morass of the Chancery Court and the self-serving avarice of everyone involved with Jarndyce and Jarndyce, legal professionals and suitors both, are at the heart of Bleak House.
Perhaps this is what drew me to this novel at this time—our current legal profession’s contemptible deployment of lawfare to silence dissent. This week, Trump filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and an individual pollster, Ann Seltzer, for running a poll suggesting—wrongly as it turned out, to our great dismay—that he was losing in Iowa. This, Trump’s ridiculous lawsuit claimed, amounted to “brazen election interference.” He will lose this case, but that’s not the point. The point is to sap his critics of time, money, energy, and the will to live. That new lawsuit came on the heels of a speedy settlement Donald arrived at with ABC News, which corporate overlords, despite their deep pockets, pusillanimously decided not to fight for the First Amendment in court.
The vengeful President-Elect is not the only MAGA figure to file frivolous lawsuits with the aim of thwarting and/or silencing critics. Devin Nunes sued a pseudonymous Twitter user, Devin’s Cow. Elon Musk sued Media Matters. Mike Flynn sued the indefatigable Jim Stewartson and the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson. That last case was tossed out earlier this month.
“If the purpose of terror is to terrorize,” Wilson wrote of his unpleasant and expensive experience, “the purpose of lawfare is also to terrorize. The tools and techniques of lawfare, particularly these loonbucket defamation suits, would terrify people without means, experience, and strong legal representation.”
If the Trump people keep up with this “SLAPP” lawsuits—and, being soulless ghouls, they will—perhaps the American Bar Association, or the bars of the individual states, might take some decisive action and start 86-ing the attorneys who are serial participants in this systematic legal harassment. But I won’t hold my breath.
Deep into the novel, in a chapter devoted to another amoral attorney, the gray and dull Mr. Vholes, Dickens gives us as unvarnished an assessment as can be found in the thousand pages:
The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.
But not perceiving this quite plainly—only seeing it by halves in a confused way—the laity sometimes suffer in peace and pocket, with a bad grace, and DO grumble very much.
What was true of English law then is, if I might suggest, equally true of U.S. law today. Furthermore, we might also, at the butt-end of the Year of our Lord 2024, replace, in that wonderfully candid passage, “the English law” with “the American legacy media,” “the American political system,” “the American entertainment industry,” and, as a nod to the contemporary assassin with the Dickensian monicker of Luigi Mangione, “the American for-profit healthcare industry.”
Money makes the world go round, and their side has a lot more of it than ours—or, at least, a lot more that they are willing to blow on assholery of the kind that will chill journalism and hasten our descent into dictatorship. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness; democracy dies in deposition.
There is also Trump’s fascination with the Gilded Age, the Robber Baron era. Dickens was dead a quarter century before McKinley was elected in 1894, and his descriptions of London are largely drawn from his own childhood in the 1820s. Even so, we can see in Bleak House the qualities that, to Donald’s way of thinking, are what made America so great back in the 1890s: child labor, unsafe housing, air and water pollution, outbreaks of diseases we now vaccinate against, domestic violence, rigid class systems, women as second-class citizens, and, of course, the existence of monarchs.
What I like most about Dickens is that he addresses grim subjects without being a total downer—and thus avoids making us want to stop reading. There is always a level of detachment from the goings-on. Not that we are not emotionally connected—I loved Lady Dedlock, and Esther Summerson, and John Jarndyce—but we never quite feel the danger ourselves. We readers are in a safe space, protected like Mr. Jarndyce protects Miss Summerson.
Dickens is never not optimistic. For all the death and shame and bankruptcy and contagion and dirt and fog and smoke and fire, for all the corrupt lawyers and nasty blackmailers and abused children and homicidal housekeepers, Bleak House is ultimately a hopeful book. If we are shown the worst of humanity, we are also given examples of people at their best—paragons of virtue and decency.
In the 67th and final chapter of the book, the exemplary Esther, our occasional narrator, describes her happiness with her marriage to Allan Woodcourt, a small-town doctor who is the love of her life:
We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we have quite enough. I never walk out with my husband but I hear the people bless him. I never go into a house of any degree but I hear his praises or see them in grateful eyes. I never lie down at night but I know that in the course of that day he has alleviated pain and soothed some fellow-creature in the time of need. I know that from the beds of those who were past recovery, thanks have often, often gone up, in the last hour, for his patient ministration. Is not this to be rich?
It is, Esther. It is indeed.
And some of us don’t even require a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future to know it.
PROGRAMMING NOTES
I will be off for the next week, returning for next week’s “Sunday Pages.”
The PREVAIL podcast is on hiatus for a few weeks.
The Five 8 is also dark this week; our guest on Friday’s show was Jen Mercieca.
My book, Rough Beast, makes a great stocking stuffer!
Merry Christmas!
Photo credit: Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock in the 2005 BBC production of “Bleak House,” which I started watching last night, and which is fabulous!
Bleak House is the name of John Jarndyce’s estate, where the three teenagers, wards of Chancery, go to live at the opening of the novel. The name is ironical. The place is anything but bleak, and made all the less so by the welcome infusion of youth and hope and beauty. The actual house of bleakness that the title refers to, rather, is the home of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and Lady Dedlock, who is, Dickens tells us, “bored to death.”
The most famous line from Dickens, I think, is the opening of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I always took that to mean a sense of equilibrium, a balancing of the scales; or, perhaps, that the era could be good or bad depending on one’s perspective. But what he really means is that the late 18th century, when that book is set, is an Age of Extremes. He’s saying: “Oh my God, this is the greatest, biggest, greatest year there ever was” and also, “Good Lord, this is the shittiest, worst, vilest 12 months of all time ever.” Might 2025 be like that?
The consummate writer, Nabokov wrote all his lectures down. The Bleak House lecture is included in Lectures on Literature, published posthumously in 1980.
In 1852-3, when Bleak House was published, the Chancery was notorious for being slow, bewildering, and unfair; the book helped bring about much needed court reform.
"What I like most about Dickens is that he addresses grim subjects without being a total downer—and thus avoids making us want to stop reading."
And that, kind sir, is one of the reasons why I continue to subscribe to your writings.
I am fond of alliteration -- it makes for fun moments while reading. As of this morning, you win the Grand Prized for Alliteration, a nine-word sentence, seven words of which begin with the letter "d" (plus, the sentence is apt):
"Democracy doesn't die in darkness; democracy dies in deposition."
Thanks for making my day.